Punk Spunk

By R.S.

BREATHLESS Directed by Jim McBride

Screenplay by L.M. Kit Carson and Jim McBride

For the generation that learned to take film seriously in the '60s, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless was nothing less than breathtaking. Offhandedly it proposed that B movies, and almost everything else in the junk culture, actually influenced behavior more profoundly than the official culture did. Openly, instead of in the coded language of melodrama, the picture suggested that most of the violence in society was both meaningless and affectless. And this it did with a brash, jump-cut technique that seemed to be anti-technique. Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the old Poverty Row movie mill, this was a Hollywood film as it might have been had the place served as the locale instead of a state of mind.

One can only imagine with what trepidation McBride and Carson, whose major previous credit is the undercult classic David Holtzman's Diary, approached the problem of remaking Breathless, updating it and resetting it in Los Angeles, the center of everything Godard was subverting. Indeed the movie never entirely shakes off its self-consciousness. But the stale, cynical air that attends most remakes is absent here. Carson knows how to write out of the side of his mouth, and McBride knows how to stage both action and eroticism; their work has a drive and energy that derive from conviction and, perhaps, good old American know-how. Best of all, the film makers have found in Richard Gere an actor who can play a dumb, crazy punk and make the audience like him. It is a breakthrough performance for an actor who has brooded prettily over various victimizations in the past, but never showed this strength of characterlessness before.

The story is the same. Gere steals a car, kills a highway patrolman without quite meaning to, while heading for the big city and an up-scale lady. She knows better than to scratch this itch, does anyway, but then betrays her lover to the police, mostly, it seems, to assert the ascendancy of middle-class values over steaming sexual impulse. In the original movie, Jean Seberg played an American stranger in the strange French landscape. Here, of course, the roles must be reversed. France's Valerie Kaprisky plays the uprooted thrill seeker with the same air of being stunned by the outrageous message her nerve ends are sending to her brain. The major difference between the films is Gere's characterization. Jean-Paul Belmondo played the petty crook as a Bogart clone, sardonic and dour. Gere takes his beat from Jerry Lee Lewis records. He is an instinctive anarchist moving to a wild rock pulse, and such thoughts as he has are supplied by Silver Surfer, the comic-book character. That, in particular, is a superb invention, giving the film a compulsive rhythm that drives out comparisons and forces the audience to judge the film on its own terms.

But not, alas, all of the time. Sometimes the movie's movieness is too studied. The color palette occasionally swings all the way to '40s stylization, and these sequences jar against the naturalistic tones of the rest of the film. Sometimes the attempt to turn all of Los Angeles into one big backlot is forced. The writing can become too overtly existential, as if McBride and Carson wanted to prove that besides flicking out in their formative years, they read books too. And the concluding sequence stretches what should have been a down and dirty death into a long romantic agony. But if Godard's Breathless was informed by the inventiveness of poverty, not to mention the daring and nerviness of youth, this one is at least touched by talent and a sort of punk spunk. Its makers understand the difference between a knock-off and a homage, and it is the latter they have entertainingly provided. -- R.S. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.